Seduced by the Soft Side

Now that I can spin finer and faster, softer wools are more attractive.  I acquired a couple of Rambouillet fleece.  Spun semi-worsted at just over 16 hanks per  pound (~9,000 ypp) and cabled into a 6-ply fingering (1,300 ypp @ 40 wpi), it is is perhaps the nicest knitting yarn I have ever worked with.

The fine plies give it strength and durability despite the fine, skin-soft fiber.  Knit on #1 needles at 9.5 spi, the fabric is thin, light in weight, but very elastic, and very warm. The elasticity was something of surprise. It is far, and away, the nicest fabric that I have ever knit.

Relaxed, the fabric is nearly weatherproof.  Stretched, it opens up and ventilates, making it very good for active winter sports.  It is like Helio, only more so.

Estimated time for me to spin/ply enough for a Jersey is ~50 hours, which does not count fiber prep.   You can buy nice Rambouillet roving for half the price of Jacob or Shetland.  Rambouillet is finer than Shetland and much longer than Merino, so it is nice to spin. And, there is a lot of it around.  Rambouillet is similar in fineness and length to Cormo, but this season Cormo is in fashion, so Rambouillet is a bargain. The thin yarn means that you need less wool. ( Less than 1.5 lb compared to ~ 2.5  lb for sweater designs using commercial worsted weight wool,  but this sweater will be warmer.) Well, yes thin yarn means there is more spinning and knitting - but is that really so bad?  I mean we like spinning and knitting soft fibers - right?  My estimated total time for a Jersey is on the order of  150 hours.

And, it is just in time, as I hear that Wingham's has stopped producing gansey yarn due to equipment failure.  It was one of the best yarns on the market and it will be missed.

WPI

There is a long standing convention in the textile industry on wraps per inch (wpi). Pack to refusal!  They wind the thread into a slot or gap and they pack to refusal.  (It is a gentle and careful packing that does not  deform the yarn.)  This results in an accurate and precise number that can be related to yards per pound (ypp).

Knitters on the other hand, when making wpi measurements wind their "wpi" loosely, (well not too loosely),  and they get a number that is "fuzzy".  See for example http://www.yarnfwd.com/tension.html  or http://www.hatchtown.com/tools/misc-tools/wpi-wraps-per-inch. It is a more modern method, but it will not give a precise and accurate number. And, it does not differentiate between worsted, woolen, and cotton/silk  It is a different culture. Then, they call the textile guys, "wrong" for using the old, precise method.  The only thing the fuzzy method is good for is putting the yarn in a Craft Yarn Council category.  And, that does not provide a lot of useful information. Particularly for somebody like me who is likely to be spinning fine yarns.  Trying to wrap 20,000 ypp singles (35s) loosely, but not too loosely, is an exercise in futility.   However, with the right gauge one can pack to refusal, and get a precise number.

So here is a solution. Use a gap gauge, wrap the yarn around it, and pack to refusal.  Then, for worsted add 10% and take the square of the number.  That will be a good estimate of the yards per pound.  For Woolens, add 16% and take the square of the number and you will have a good estimate for the ypp.  For silk and cotton add 7%, take the square of the number and you will have a good estimate for the ypp.  That is useful information.

Divide the number of wraps per inch packed to refusal by 2, and you will have a good estimate of the number that is defined as "wpi" by the Craft Yarn Council  and used by American knitters as "wpi.

If you have the yards per pound, take the square root and divide by 2, and you will have the knitters' wpi. Or, you can take the square root of  yards per pound, subtract 10 percent (16% for woolen, 7% for silk and cotton) and you will have the wraps per inch, which is the reciprocal of the thickness of the yarn. This gives the diameter of the yarn. This tells you something useful about the your yarn or thread.

In Judith MacKenzie 's the intentional spinner, she does not tell how to do wpi, but when we look at her projects we see that she says a  semi woolen yarn at 2475 ypp has 27 to 30 wpi; 1460 ypp has 18-20 wpi ; 300 ypp has 5 - 6  wpi.  She does not even try to get a number more precise than a range of 10%.  Shannon Okey's Spin to Knit,  on page 57 says that if  want to know more about grist, see Alden Amos's Big Book of Hand Spinning.  Well, Alden says, "Pack to refusal!"  Then Okey contradicts Alden on page on her page 126 by saying one can just wrap the yarn around a ruler.  No, that is not "pack to refusal".

This having two different measures in related fields, with the same name causes some confusion.  For example, yarn, that I say is 100 wpi, most knitters would call 50 wpi, and then they would say I do not know what I am taking about.  Well that is yarn spun at 22 hanks per pound or 12,000+ ypp.  I work with those kinds of threads every day.  Do they?  Measuring the yarn as 100 wpi tells me something useful about the yarn.  Measuring it as 50 wpi tell me that it is "lace weight", and I knew that without picking up a ruler.

Alden Amos gets it correct in his Big Book of Handspinning. I just wish that Alden had put in corrections for yarn construction and yarn fiber.  Then the wrap per inch  number in the table on his page 383 would be 7% to 16% less.    Peter Teal in Hand Woolcombing and Spinning gets it correct, and his Appendix III is the best conversion table. (However, he only addresses worsted yarns, and grist is stated in spin count.)  Better is scanned at http://www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/books/pea_fa_2.pdf.

Oil it!

Few people,(including myself), oil their spinning wheel often enough.

It does not have to be much - a fraction of a drop is enough, but it needs to often.

Better or Authentic??!

I look to history to find ways to make better textiles.

In the days when hand knitting was a profession, there were a great many talented professional hand knitters with the elan that separates the talented professional from the merely competent amateur.  I looked to this group and learned about knitting sheaths as an approach to producing better textiles.  Modern amateur knitters and historians suggested that such knitting was not "authentic."  Since then, some of these folk have gone on to write extensively about the history of knitting sheaths.  Good for them!  However, their writing would have more authenticity if they would become more proficient in the use of the various knitting sheath technologies.

Prior to the spinning jenny, there were a great many talented professional hand spinners with the elan that separates the talented professional from the merely competent amateur. Competition drove some of them to produce better products.  In contrast, today we have very few talented professional hand spinners.  If modern hand spinners were producing yarns that really satisfied me, I would not have been plowing history looking for better yarns, now would I?   Some of the amateur spinners that made denigrating comments about the historical use of knitting sheaths, are now saying that my hand spinning of better yarns is not historically accurate.

I really do not care.  The yarns are fabulous!  The virtues of yarns worsted spun from spun long wool with fine plies have been long and widely documented. Cotswold wool came into prominence  in Roman times and from the nature of the wool we can guess that they were spinning the same kind of yarns that I am now spinning.  The truth is that the talented professional hand spinners had customers that wanted better yarns and who were willing to pay for them.  I expect talented professional spinners produced a range of better yarns for different uses.  I say that the right yarn for the job is the right yarn for the job, and a talented spinner with elan will find, and make, the right yarn for that job.

And while I am on the topic, Shetland spun into fine worsted plies is the right yarn for other jobs.  Warmer than the Cotswold, I am spinning this week, but still very durable.  Start with lace yarn and keep plying.  The  fiber is thinner so you can spin thicker plies and still have drape.

My feeling is that over the last 40 years, few hand spinners had the skill to spin such yarns or the elan to see the possibilities inherent in such yarns. When those experienced spinners see a new spinner producing yarns they did  not think could be produced by hand, they respond by saying it is not authentically historic - just as they did when I brought up knitting sheaths.  If modern knitting had been adequate for my wants, I would not have been plowing history looking for a better way to knit.  Likewise, modern hand spinning was not adequate for my wants so I went to history to find a better way.

apology

It would seem that I owe everybody an apology.

When I am doing a lot of knitting, I use hand lotion.  My favorite kinds are Udderly SMOOTH, Bert's Bees Hand salve, and Bag Balm.These hand lotions contain mixes of lanolin, olive oil, bees wax, petrolatum, plus blending agents. A project knit over several days is like to see more than one kind, of hand lotion used on it, and possibly all three. The net effect was that all of my knit objects were made of dense yarns, and those dense yarns were impregnated with hydrophobic materials.

When I finish knitting an object, I wash the object with soap and warm water. This is a sink of suds and enough scrubbing to full the wool. It is not gentle.  However, it seems that the washing has not been aggressive enough to remove all of the hand lotion from the core of the yarn. Thus, my knitting is impregnated with lanolin and other hydrophobic materials from the get go.  It is why water does not wet my knitting.   Even when the hydrophobic materials were washed off the surface of the yarns, a few days of wear would bring the lanolin and etc out of the core of the yarn, and the yarn would be water repellent again.

However, this does not change the fact, that more loosely knit (and oiled) fabrics are not weatherproof. A rain drop hits them and breaks into tiny droplets that go right through a loosely knit garment.  In contrast, when a rain drop hits a tightly knit garment, the raindrop breaks into tiny droplets that are stopped by the tight knitting.  When I did comparisons between objects knit on small needles similar objects knit on big   (i.e., http://www.craftyarncouncil.com/ recommended ) needles, both were were knit using the same mix of hand lotions, thus both were equally oiled. It is jut that I already moved to knitting with hand lotions before I started working with finer needles.

Tighter is warmer was and is a valid result.

Connecting the Dots

The Yorkshire textile industry went from local for local consumption to industrial scale for export in the period circa 1350 to 1370.  This is the period and region when and where the term "hank" (skein of 560 yards) came into English.  We can assume that the industrialization of the (wool sorting, combing, spinning, and weaving) industries included the count system.  The count system specified wool fineness in hanks per pound that could be spun from the wool by a competent spinner. The yarns from those wools were specified in hanks per pound.  With a common technical language the weavers, spinners, combers, wool sorters, wool growers, and all of the associated middle men and factors could specify needs, and products.  Thus, 16 count refers to a coarse wool, and 16s refers to a single spun so that a hank weighs one once.  Then, "20s" refers to singles spun to 20 hanks per pound.


Prior to 1350, it is hard to know what Yorkshire spinners were spinning.  However, by 1375, a lot of Yorkshire spinners were spinning worsted 16s,  20s, 40s, and etc.  These were standard yarns used by weavers to make cloth that was being produced by the ship load.  There were pack trains of such singles being carried across Yorkshire.  We know that some of these singles were dyed and plied, i.e., were not going to weavers.


The period of 1350 to 1375 is also the period during which the English navy was established, and had its first winter engagements with the (new) French navy.  It was also the beginning of British fishing in Icelandic waters. Thus, there was an increased demand for warmer clothing for sailors and fishermen.


The implication is that fine worsted singles were plied up to knitting yarns.  This makes sense.  In those days wool was valuable.  They wanted as much warmth as possible from the least weight of wool.  The way to do that is to work with yarns that have very fine plies.  If the sailor-boys were cold, it was easy to produce warmer garments by plying up thicker yarns from the fine plies that were being produced for the very large weaving industry, and then knitting the thicker yarns.


Hand spin worsted 16s (8,960 ypp) and ply them up into 3-ply (2,700 ypp), knit it on fine needles, and it will be warmer than modern mill spun sport weight (1,000 ypp) knit on # 4 needles.  Weird but true! The fabric knit from the modern mill spun will look thicker and warmer, but the eye is deceived. On the other hand, that hand spun, worsted spun, 3-ply is going to be very thin.  It will as thin as what we call "lace-weight".  My point is that those old hand spun Shetland shawls knit from "lace-weight" on "knitting pins" were warmer than a shawl that a modern knitter would knit from modern mill spun sport weight on the recommended needles. Modern mill spun gansey yarn (5-ply worsted sport weight) knit on #1 needles is warmer than hand spun 3-ply (worsted, 2,700 ypp).  The other side of this is that when I ply my hand spun worsted 20s up into a 16 wpi yarn, it is much denser, stronger, and warmer than any modern mill spun 16 wpi knitting yarn.  When that hand spun, fine ply, 16 wpi is knit on fine needles, it is much warmer than any modern mill spun knitting yarn knit on any needles.


Yes, the pre-mill-spun knit fabrics did tend to be made from thin yarns made from fine plies - because that was what worked.  If I need a warm sweater, I will spin fine singles and ply up to what ever yarn thickness I need, because a few extra hours of spinning will bring greater warmth and years of durability.  I can do this because  I can easily spin 16s. or 20s or even 24s.  So could the old spinners.  It is what they did, all day, day after day.


When mill spun made yarn cheap, we lost our professional hand spinners in the period of a generation. Yes, there were still hand spinners around the world, supplying family and local markets. However, hand spinning on a large scale was gone, and with it went a variety of skills and tools.


Some of these tools and skills are still known by a few, but are ignored by most hand spinners.  Consider differential rotation speed (DRS).  DRS is well documented in Amos's "Big Book of Handspinning", and yet DRS is ignored and even denied by a great many spinners.  Peter Teal was an engineer, who wrote an important book on Wool Combing and Worsted Spinning.  However, he never understood DRS.  Abby Franquemont wrote a well respected book on spinning, but judging from her posts on Ravelry, she does not understand DRS.


How do I know DRS works?  Because I use it to spin worsted  20s and 30s quickly and easily. Certainly, 20s,  30s and even 235s can be spun using a spindle or ST wheel or an Irish Tension/German Tension wheel, but not as quickly and easily.  The only tool that comes close to DRS is Great Wheel with a Miner's Head, and there quality problems tend to intrude at speed. The DD system with a precise DRS solution is likely to be 30% faster.  The other tool required for such spinning is a distaff. 

Fifth grade physics

Let us consider the world of Peter Teal - Hand Woolcombing and Spinning.  PT puts a lot of effort into combing, planking, and drawing off a uniform sliver of parallel wool fibers, then he put a lot more effort into drafting them "inch worm".  If he had just thought about his fifth grade physics, he would have realized that there is an easier way.  A way that was long utilized and memorialized in art.  It is the art of the distaff.

Wool is long, flexible fibers with little scales on them which tend to catch on other wool fibers.  If you have a short, neat sliver of  parallel fibers of wool, and pull fibers out of one end, then the scales on those fibers will catch other fibers, and pull the other fibers out of parallel, and into "disarray".  With the fibers at the drafting tip of the sliver in disarray, then the spinner must resort to inch worm drafting to pull them straight and parallel again.

The fifth grade physics approach is to avoid the disarray by anchoring the upstream end of the fibers by attaching the far end of the sliver to a distaff.  Then the entire sliver is under tension, and the tension holds all fibers straight and parallel.  Near the drafting triangle, the drafting hand maintains a taper from the main sliver to the drafting triangle so that the upper end of all of the draftable fibers are in contact with more fibers than the drafting end of those fibers.  Thus, there is more friction at the sliver end of those fibers and the process of drafting tends to hold those fibers straight and parallel.  The reason that the distaff was call "the rock" is because the spinner was always pulling against the distaff.

When the drafting process inherently aligns the fibers, then the drafting can be a continuous process.  As a continuous process, it can be very fast.  With a distaff, one can draft worsted style singles as fast or faster as long draw woolen spinning.  Further more, if all the fibers in the drafting triangle are aligned, then the spinner can allow twist to run up into the drafting triangle and still have worsted yarn.

I started spinning about 3 years ago.  Prior to that I was reading about spinning, and watching spinners.  I read the modern literature on hand spinning, and I go to spinning guild meetings and fiber shows.  And I spin.

Merino, spun "worsted" as 20s, and made up into 2-ply.  The grist of the above 2-ply yarn is ~5,000 ypp or just over 10 meters per gram. The yarn is very soft, very stretchy, and silky smooth.  It is not something Peter Teal could have spun because he did use a distaff.  With a distaff, it is easy.

I trashed the first few video clips I shot of this process because I was intending to spin 9,000 ypp and I was spinning 11,000 ypp and the camera could not pick up the fine thread.  Over the last few weeks, I have had to relearn how to spin thicker singles, i.e., the 5,600 ypp and 9,000 that were the base of all my yarns.  Now, I am redesigning my yarns because with finer plies, I can make nicer yarns, and finer is nicer.  It is softer, smoother, stronger, and more durable.  Nicer!

Here is the setup (with the new distaff.)  I am putting a lot of time in on distaff design, not because it is hard, but because distaffs are so important.

And here is the spinning.  As you can see, the single is worsted and the process is long draw.  The pinch from my left hand (on camera) prevents twist from running into the draft triangle which goes off to the right of the frame.

Double Flier Spinning Wheels

The Han Chinese  (2,000 years ago) had treadle powered, double spindle spinning wheels so that a cotton spinner could spin with both hands.  In 1598, the British Parliament passed a law requiring spinning schools to teach their students how to spin with both hands and to have double flier spinning wheels so the students could practice the art.  It was one way to spin faster in a world without spinning mills.


Now, I have one!  Well, I do,  if a pile of  worm eaten oak counts?

She is broke, and has had major repairs at least twice in her life - done at a level of craftsmanship that is much lower than the original wheel.  The poor quality of the rather extensive repair distracts from the fact that the wheel was originally rather fine. At one time, she did a good bit of spinning because both of the flier/bobbin assemblies are worn, and the axle of the replaced bobbin is very worn.

The wheel diameter is ~15".  Wheel to bobbin ratio is ~ 1:10.  DRS is ~ 1.2, however, in the original bobbin, the whorl is very deep and narrow, so that actual DRS would depend on the width of the cord.  The drive wheel has two grooves, and the flier/bobbin assemblies were offset, so that each could have their own DD drive band and each flier/bobbin assembly has its own tension adjustment screw.  The hecks were set only 1/8th inch apart.  The bobbins are captive in the fliers, and the orifices are ~3/16th inch.

ETA 10/28 (not captive, just lots and lots of gunk in the way.)
ETA 10/30 Made in Germany circa 1900.

Handspun 10-ply Aran yarn

It can be done.

10-ply,. 700 yards per pound. 16 wpi.    That right!

If you take the singles that were hand spun worsted for weaving at 16 hanks per pound from Shetland wool, and ply them up as 5 X 2-ply you get a yarn that the same thickness as the Yorkshire gansey yarn, but is 30% denser and thus much warmer.  The first small skein is being blocked now,

and will go to the Guild meeting  for show and tell.

I figure ~100 hours to spin the yarn for a Aran fisherman's sweater and a 100 hours to knit.  A wife could do an Aran in 3 months just working on it 2 or 3 hours per day.  It would be much much warmer than a gansey made of Yorkshire 5-ply @ 1000 ypp ( 50 hours to spin and  80 hours to knit) .  Well worth the extra effort if your man is fishing the North Sea.

The little square wooden thing is a "plying comb".  It helps to organize the singles and makes producing 5-ply yarn much easier, and the yarn more consistent.  I like historians - even long dead ones  : ).  They tell me about the the tools I need to do the job right.

The first skein off  the wheel this morning was 5-ply @ 1,800 ypp.  Interesting, but not much practical value that I can see.

The process that I now like  is to spin 16 or 18 hank/ lb singles and make 2-ply.  (Come on, you spin for fun.  Spinning fine means more fun per pound.  And, it means fabrics that are lighter, more durable, and warmer.) The 2-ply is stronger more stable, and easier to handle. Then, 2 X 2-ply is light fingering, 3 X 2-ply is  sport and 4 X 2-ply is worsted weight.  Of these the 3X 2-ply is the winner for most knitting.   The more plies make it  more consistent, warmer, and more durable than the 2 or 3-ply worsted weight that is more common.  More plies allow the fabric to be softer and more flexible than the 5-ply of similar grist and twist.

Anything that can be done, can be done better

The spindle with removable whorl got shown to a Portuguese historian. She will be starting extensive travels in the near future. We played with the spindle for a while (we were at the LYS) and decided it (with a distaff) was as fast as any of the traveling wheels in the store. So, I gave it to her. I believe in giving nice gifts to the people that write history.  

Thus,   I needed a new spindle.  Mark II:

It is 15 grams lighter than the Mark I.

It did not work!  The weight or dynamics were wrong and it wobbled too much.  Put that puppy on a diet.

Thinned, with a deeper groove and a heavier nut, it works.  It wants a distaff.  And, it wants to spin much finer than I was trying to spin the blue Romney above.  Details matter.

The Sum of All

It is possible to hand spin worsted yarn using a "long-draw" technique.  ( Not what you have been told before, now is it? )

It requires special tools.  One must have a DD wheel with the appropriate differential rotation speed (DRS) and bobbin core size to insert the correct twist and to take-up at the correct rate.  It requires well combed top on a well designed distaff.

It only works at fairly high grist (9,000 ypp and up depending on fiber), and it only works for spinning at a brisk pace.

The process involves the drafting hand teasing fiber out of the sliver attached to the distaff.  The fibers are kept under some tension as they stream into the drafting hand where they are spread to form the base of the drafting triangle. The tip of the drafting triagle is a narrow ribbon of fibers feeding between the forefinger and thumb of the pinching hand. The drafting hand and pinching hand are moved together and apart for precise control of the grist,  The pinching hand keeps enough pressure on the tip of the drafting triangle to keep the twist from traveling up into the drafting triangle, but not so much pressure as to stop the continuous stream of fibers through the "pinch".  The thumb and forefinger of the pinching hand move back and forth to facilitate movement of the fibers through the pinch.

With lower grist singles, it is not possible to stop the twist from moving up into the drafting zone. Without a distaff, it is not possible to get the fibers aligned as they enter the drafting zone.

I had though the technique possible shortly after I started working with controlled DRS systems, however, I had not been able to make it work.  The addition of a distaff was required to actually make the concept work.

The process is very fast.

Pictures and details to come.

Spindles and spindle whorls

A while back, I thought about spindles.  I went around and played with a bunch of  them.  I went into the shop and made a few.  My conclusion was that they were toys. I concluded that modern spindle designs were not really tools for serious worsted thread production. 

I was missing two technologies that are essential to the system.  One is the distaff.  The other is a removable whorl.  We find whorls made of fired clay, metal and stone around the world, and we tend to assume that that entire spindle was lost, all at once, and then the wooden shaft rotted away, leaving the whorl for us to find.

However, looking at accounts of spinners in the Highlands, they put a whorl on the spindle, start spinning, and as the copp builds, they take the whorl off, put it in their pocket, and let the copp act as the whorl. This allows them to produce longer continuous threads.  This is a tool for serious worsted thread production.

And, it is easy to lose a whorl out of  their pocket.

I have come up with a spindle design that I like much better than any other that I have tried.

I start with a spindle shaft about 12 inches long.  It has a spiral groove for the thread (because hooks catch on everything and a half-hitch causes the thread to lose 40% of the thread's tensile strength.  If you design the spindle assuming the use of a half-hitch, then you reduce the length of the thread that can be spun on that spindle by 40%.)  The groove is made with a small knife and a rasp.

I go to the hardware store and I buy 2 threaded nuts, one big, and one small.  I thin the spindle down, leaving a bulge at the bottom.  The bulge is large enough that the threads of the large nut will catch on it and tapered enough that I can thread the small nut on it.  Threaded nuts for bolts are very cheap.  You can afford to buy a few  in the event that your "spindle whorl" falls out of your pocket.

I "screw" the large nut on the bottom of the spindle and start spinning. 

 As my copp grows, I take the heavy nut off and put the small nut on.

When the copp gets large enough to stabilize the spindle, I take the nut off and put it in my pocket where it can fall out.

The metal nuts have enough weight to spin well.  Their concentrated weight means that the spindle tends to spin fast - much faster than with modern disk-whorl designs.  So fast, that you can not draft fast enough to keep up with it -- unless you are spinning fairly fine and have a distaff to help you draft faster.  This is not a spindle for beginners.

Here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp78jcvJizA) and here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4lzA_aBHCI),  even after their copp has grown, the fixed whorl tends to slow the RPM of the spindle, limiting how fast they can spin, and the weight of the whorl limits how fine and long a thread they can spin. However,  it is not hard to find pictures of  Peruvian spinners using removable whorls and distaves.  See for example http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/SpindleWhorls.html

ETA:  Last night, Will Taylor told me that many South American spinners use machine nuts as spindle whorl weights.

ETA: The idea 

Distaff

 I did not learn to use a distaff when spinning wool. Then, I read a post in the blog, A stitch in time, and she pointed out that all the old pictures of spinners have distaves. So, I tried it. 

It works. OK, that is part of my Niddy poked into a hole in my Traddy, but it works!

For worsted spinning, it is like having 3 hands. The drafting hand can keep some tension between the distaff and the drafting zone to keep the fibers aligned. This is sort of like continuous pre-drafting. While a wrist distaff or wrapping the roving around the drafting arm can store fiber and help keep it orderly and out of the way, these methods do not aid in the drafting process like a real distaff.  A good distaff aids in the drafting process.  

Those old timers had a lot spinning to do, and a short time to do it.  They knew how to spin a high-quality thread as fast as possible.  They used a distaff

I swear that I have not seen modern spinners using real distaves, but then a few days ago I would have sworn it was not in the books either.  However, there it is, in the first paragraph of Chapter 7 in Amos.  He did not write “Use a distaff when spinning linen.”  No, he wrote, “Use a distaff.”

The problem that I had with the distaff was that my grist rose from my intended 9,000 ypp to 14,000 ypp. I have to retrain my drafting hand -- or change my yarn design. 

What works best? Actually a wooden yard stick stuck in my waist band worked fairly well, and is fairly typical of what we see  in Classic Greek art.  However, it is a bit awkward for sitting at a spinning wheel.  For a spinning wheel, Amos suggests a free standing distaff.  However, I like to spin in my window corner beside the breakfast table - not much floor space there.  Thus, my solution is a distaff attached to my wheel.

How good is it?  Well I am spending all day making a better one.  It is a technology with huge promise.

Russian Distaves

It is like knitting sheaths.  They made them because they work very well.

PS. It is not pretty but the Mark II distaff is very, very functional:

Spinning in Public

I like the idea, but I cannot do it.

When I spin in public, I slow down and my grist goes all over the place. At Lambtown, I spun for HOURS and produced a grand total of 350 yards of single, some of which was thin and some of which was fat, and all of which was poor quality. Intended grist for the day was ~9,000 ypp, actual average grist was less than 5,400.  OK, there was poor light where I was sitting and other factors, but a week later in a spinning group, with the same intended grist, my actual grist was less than 8,000 ypp.

My hat is off to the folks that can spin their intended grist in public.  I have given up trying to spin project quality singles in public.  In the future, I will take some of that Blue Romney that I have, and not worry about what I am actually spinning.

quick kniddy noddy

Not a love token 

but it works, it fits in the spinning bag,

and it was not much effort.

Note that the ends are different.  If I ever need to make another, I will know which shapes work better.

DRS, fineness, and vibration

Vibration in a DD system raises the effective DRS, making it more difficult to spin at the fineness expected from the calculated DRS.

Surprise!  If you want to spin fine, you need a smooth-running spinning wheel.

After a year of use, my Traddy had some wear, and hence more vibration.  And, I swear, I oiled it every 4 hours using good oil.  On the other hand, I ran it long and fast.  Nice thing about a Traddy is that new bearings are inexpensive.  A few new bearings and everything is back to fast and smooth.

Plying from a center-pull cake

With improvised cake holders, the singles twist.  Better is:

Lambtown

I will be at Lambtown in Dixon, Ca this year.  I will be helping around the Merdian Jacob booth.

I am in the wood shop this week, so the Traddy will be tricked out. The "F-word" may be heard as in, "That is f^&*hair!!"

DRS Revisited

I have been plying yarn for my Shetland gansey.  Some of the singles were spun last winter before I built the Hot Rod and some after. 


Running the singles through my fingers, I am impressed by the consistent fineness of the singles spun using the Ashford high speed whorl and bobbins with whorls that provide the proper DRS (differential rotation speed) for the grist of yarn being spun.  While the Hot Rod certainly allows me to spin faster, singles spun on it tend to drift in thickness.  For example, singles that I intend to be ~9,000 ypp end up with portions being closer to 7,000 ypp or 11,000 ypp.  I think this is because with the small whorls, a small change in anything changes the DRS.  While the standard Ashford high speed whorl is twice as large, so the same change in that system makes only half as much change in its DRS. 


Anyway, I am going to move toward larger whorls so that I have better control of my  DRS.  I have not decided if I am going to do that by putting an accelerator wheel on the Traddy or if I will buy a 30 inch wheel.  


Most of last week, I had the Ashford Lace Flier (ST) on the wheel.  First and foremost, I do not think that there is any question that a good bumpless driveband (per Amos) delivers more power than the Ashford Turbo driveband (clear stretchy plastic).  2)  Fluorocarbon leader material (fishing line) makes very good brake band material for spinning very fine yarns. 


As long as we are talking about spinning fine, see the Bothwell Spining results at http://www.bothwellspinin.com/spinin/files/LongestThreadResults_2011l.pdf   The winners are spinning singles up in the range of 100,000 ypp or 176 hanks/ lb. The winner, Jan Zandbelt, currently uses a Louet Julia, but in 2007, he used a Majacraft Suzie with 1 gram of brake tension and custom made ultra-light weight spinning bobbins.  Of course, that contradicts my thoughts about DD being better for spinning fine.  Or, does it?


I do not spin that fine.  I do not try to spin that fine.  I do not need singles finer than about 27,000 ypp.  I aim to spin my finest singles at ~90% of  their spinning count.  Thus, Polwarth has a spinning count of ~ 62, so I would aim to spin it at ~ 31,000 ypp.  Zandbelt spins it at 88,400 ypp.


Does that invalidate everything that I say?  I want yarns that knit up into fabrics that I like, and I want to produce those yarns with a minimum of effort. Zandbelt wants thin yarn for contests. He says that "Patience"  is important.  We have different goals.   


However, I am arrogant enough to think that if I wanted to spin Polwarth  into a yarn that was too fragile for any practical use, I could.   I would approach the problem by making up a DD spinning bobbin with a DRS of 1.01 and a bobbin core diameter of 0.625".  I think that for that low a DRS, I would use the regular Ashford DD flier whorl, which gives me a bobbin whorl diameter of 1.73". We are talking a bobbin speed of 1,200 RPM.  My bobbin has not gone that slow in ages.  It would take all weekend to spin 10 grams. "Patience" is right. 

The hot rod spinning wheel revisited

In May, I wrote about how I had upgraded my Ashford Traditional spinning wheel.
Since then I have spun a lot of singles in the 5,600 to 9,000 ypp range on it and I have some thoughts.

The DRS (differential rotation speed) between the flier and the bobbin controls the twist.  The accumulated twist changes as the diameter of the copp wound onto the  bobbin changes.  Thus, when I have accumulated a layer of yarn that is ~ 3/8"  thick on the bobbin, I wind off.  This is a pain in the neck.  I use my wood lathe as a bobbin winder to wind off the bobbin. (It is very fast, and is always handy there in the middle of the workshop.)   Without a good wind off approach (or using very long bobbins) using DRS to control twist is not practical.

There has been more wear on the bearings and axles than I expected.  I oil frequently, but I use a high belt tension, and there is a lot of wear. Thus, the machine is getting noisy.

Over the last few days, I swapped it back to standard Ashford double drive and spun a while.  Currently the Ashford Lace Flier is on the wheel. The Ashford Lace Flier is 30:1 ST, but compared to the 40:1 DD, the ST lace flier is much slower.   Spinning on the Ashford Lace Flier is a very pleasant pastime, but it is SLOW!    

With a larger drive wheel (30"), I could use a lower belt tension and with less noise and wear.  : )